In another victory for the Freedom of Information Act, environmentalists have outed a high-ranking Bush administration appointee’s repeated rejections of recommendations by government biologists to protect plants and animals under the Endangered Species Act.

As reported earlier this week by Juliet Eilperin in this Washington Post story, Julie MacDonald, the deputy assistant Interior secretary in charge of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, refused to go along with warnings that species such as the white-tailed prairie dog and Gunnison sage grouse are at risk of extinction. Eilperin continues:

MacDonald said she does not make the decision on whether to federally protect a species, because the head of the Fish and Wildlife Service has that responsibility. But she said she had made her feelings clear in an array of documents; overruled scientists’ conclusions in areas where she has authority, such as designating critical habitat; and mocked rank-and-file employees’ recommendations.

MacDonald’s degree, by the way, is in civil engineering. She’s criticizing the work of biologists.

As much as this all sounds like what’s becoming an archetypical Bush Appointee Screws Environment story, bear in mind that the Clinton administration did plenty to weaken the Endangered Species Act, too.

As the Dateline Earth duo revealed in a 2005 series entitled “A License to Kill,” a wave of so-called “habitat conservation plans” have allowed developers, mining companies and others to ensure they would not be prosecuted for harming threatened or endangered species.

Supposedly they must do something good for the species to make up for the bad stuff they do, so-called “mitigation.” But our series cited numerous examples where this was clearly not the case.

One plan we featured was San Diego’s, a massive undertaking frequently cited as proof that HCPs really do help species. But we found condoms and other garbage being dumped on lands supposedly “preserved” for species that live in vernal pools, such as the fairy shrimp. (It’s a fascinating creature, a remnant of the sealife that thrived on the bluffs when they were covered by the oceans. Today, they hatch in the pools left by winter rains and live just two weeks before depositing eggs in sand to await the next year’s rains, and so on.)

Fairy shrimp

Now a recent court ruling has rejected provisions San Diego’s HCP, which is frequently cited as an example of how the new breed of HCPs really do help the critters. Check out this quote from the ruling by U.S. District Judge Rudi Brewster:

It appears to this court that the (plan) would permit monumental destruction of the vernal pool species, which are extremely sensitive to their environment and were virtually extinct in 1995. The court finds that (the Fish and Wildlife Service) overlooked an important aspect . . . because the malleable standard — to avoid the pools when ‘practicable’ — virtually guarantees development and ersatz mitigation measures run counter to the realistic needs of these dwindling vernal pool species.